(Vintage, 2008) Most writers I know don’t dream of a cover they adore when considering their next book; they just hope to avoid something they don’t like, or worse, they hate. I didn’t at all hate the first cover design that Vintage, and its designer, John Gall, ran by me for Like You’d Understand, Anyway, but I instantly knew it was misleading about the book. It was a nicely surreal image of a young man floating halfway to the ceiling in the aisle […]

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(Doubleday, 2012) Emily, whose work I love,  graciously solicited my input before she started the jacket. Not jacket ideas, per se—she wanted to know what visual cues had inspired me while writing the book. No designer had ever asked for my input before, and I, of course, had many compelling visual ideas to offer! One idea was to pivot off the the Vitra Design Museum poster—it’s a large poster with a grid of many, many tiny chair photographs—but try to […]

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Editor Gary Fisketjon launched Vintage Contemporaries, a paperback imprint of Random House, in September 1984. There were seven initial titles. By decade’s end, there would be close to 100. The line was a mix of reprints and originals, and nearly thirty years later the checklist found in the back of the books reads like a ballot for some Cooperstown of late-20th Century fiction.   At the time, however, the series was far more renowned for its design: the checklists, color-banded […]

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(Believer Books/McSweeney’s, 2012) One of the things I do here at McSweeney’s is design many of our book covers. I’m a longtime fan of Tom’s, ever since I read a short story of his, “God Lives in St. Petersburg,” many years ago in McSweeney’s Quarterly. Tom’s essays for The Believer have always been a highlight of that magazine, and I read each of the Believer “Magic Hours” essays when they were first published. So when it came time to figure out who […]

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